hang me up to dry
by hourglasshero
Summary: it has never been this hard coming home.


**[** a/n **]** — idk this is the only thing I've been able to successfully write for some time now, aside from my request prompts. go figure it's LenRin. and incest. and not very good... my writing style is being wonk and I'm trying to find something flowy and natural but nothing's working and this is the closest I could come. I'm angsting, I know. hopefully I'll have new stuff other than this trash up soon! enjoy in the meantime, yo.

rated T for heavy themes, incest and mild swearing.

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 _all mixed up in the wash;  
_ _hot water bleeding our colors.  
_ _now hang me up to dry;  
_ _you wrung me out too, too, too many times_ _._

 _._

 _._

Ten years is a long time to be gone.

It's an even longer time to have been gone without saying goodbye.

When he pulls open the door to let her inside, she sees not shock in his eyes, but anger. An all-consuming, palpable thing that eats her alive as she stands on a doorstep that used to be _theirs_ , but is now only his. She forfeited her claim to calling this her home a long time ago.

"I'm back," she says in barely a whisper, like she might have told him she was back from the grocery store. The words gust into violent rain that sweeps them to the dirt, never to be heard, never to be remembered. He doesn't grab for them like she hoped he would; he reels away from the door and hurriedly gestures to the bright warmth that emits from behind his back.

It's comforting, in a way, to know that he's kind after all these years. The cutting edge of ice that has chewed away at her heart hasn't had the chance to infect him. He repels the cold.

(Of course. How else could he have repelled her? How could she have even left?)

Still. He won't look at her. He refuses to.

Fleeting, he meanders into the house, and she traces his footsteps, letting the door flutter shut on accord to the wind behind her. He doesn't wait for her, only drifts in a ghostly manner to the kitchen; she can see that he's beginning to seethe. Words that have been building for a decade finally have their chance to spill from an overflowing basin.

Rin thinks she can bear it, him yelling at her. Oddly enough, it's exactly what she wants. She has never seen him furious, not quite, but she desperately craves it, him blowing a fuse and unleashing his hatred on her. Because she deserves it.

More than anything, she wants what she deserves. If this is it — if this tragedy is what she deserves — then so be it.

He positions himself at the stove, flicks on a stove burner, and sets a kettle over the flame. His shoulders heave with the intensity of his breath, as if he's just returned from running the streets of the neighborhood in the storm.

In the dim lighting of the room, Rin takes her time to observe, allowing the familiarity to settle deep into her bones. It's him that's the most familiar, with his flaxen hair done loose in a ponytail, strung in a silk ribbon at the nape of his neck. His bangs don't cooperate, never have, shooting this way and that along the crown of his head, like he hasn't stopped running his sweaty hands through it.

(That has always been a habit of his, clawing at his hair until it is nothing but knots and tangles that his comb can't later brush out; he pushes too hard, rips away, snaps the comb, and she can't fix it, not again, can't keep buying _combs_ of all things. It's just hair.

It's just him.)

Rin's gaze snakes to his skin; smooth like marble, white like snow. If she were to run a hand upon it now, she would feel impure, as if she'd touched something holy. He's always had that effect on her, a notion that touching him is wrong. It's worsened by the slenderness to his frame, the hollow jut of his ribs that not even his sweatshirt can hide, the curvature of his spine that bends in a ridiculous slouch out of him.

A skeleton remains of what once was everything to her. A memory rather than a person.

"Len," she starts, but he turns then, cobalt eyes slicing at her and melting his name into a sultry puddle on her tongue; she snaps shut her mouth and glances away, finding solace in the smudges of flour and dirt on the floorboards. They're all marks she doesn't remember making. But Len is too cleanly to keep them there.

She flicks her attention to him again in question, met by a steely glare that is so bittersweet it silences her completely. She keeps her lips pursed but her heart on her sleeve, and she waits, patiently, leaning in the threshold of the kitchen.

"Sit," Len says and waves a delicate hand at one of the high-raised chairs cast askew from the aisle table stretching across the space they occupy. Rin obliges with haste, dragging the chair closer to the countertop and wriggling her way into it. Nibbling impassively at his lip, Len faces her, his elbows scuffing gently atop the table's surface. He starts to fidget with first his fingers, and soon his hair.

His voice undeniably trembles when he mutters, "It's been ten years, Rin. Ten. _Years_." He wildly jerks a hand at nothing in particular, like he's trying to sift through the atmosphere for his argument. "You can't just — you can't just waltz into my life again like this. You can't _do_ that to me."

"It doesn't seem like you're trying to stop me," Rin says softly.

Len puffs his cheeks and exhales a quiet stream of air, hunching into himself and ducking his head. His bangs hood his eyes, and it unnerves Rin, not being able to look into them. Not being able to know what he's thinking.

(Eerily, his eyes are the key to his mindset, his emotions, his mentality. As kids, Rin could read him like a book, could list the pages like she'd memorized them.

She used to know him better than he knew himself. Now, she's not so sure.)

"Ten years is still ten years," Len chokes out, "and _you_ — you're still my sister." He twists his fingers through his ponytail until it pops from the ribbon, scatters in tendrils down his neck. He's already redoing it when he next speaks, saying, "I loathe you, but I still _missed_ you."

Out of all the things Rin could say to this, she manages, "Right," and stops there. She's damp and tired and miserable and she doesn't know how to go about this conversation. That's on him, the things left unspoken.

He's a grenade, but she hasn't pulled the pin yet.

"What did you do?" Len asks. He lazily traces patterns into the countertop, his fingernails bitten to the beds, cuticles layered in crusty brown blood. "Where did you go?"

"Europe," Rin says, "America. Brazil. Anywhere that wasn't here." She tips her nose but keeps her eyes level, breathing in measured paces to restrain her heart from beating out of her ribs and laying bleed to her sweater. She adds helplessly, "I needed to get away from you."

This disconcerts him; he jolts, posture impeccably straight as his eyes lash against her, piercing daggers to her weakened shield of resolution. What he wants is to hurt her; what she wants is to be hurt. There is only benefit here, if he just — takes it. Goes off.

(Gets it over with.)

"Me?" Len echoes hoarsely. "You needed to get away from _me_?"

"I was killing myself over you. I was draining myself of any possibility of being happy and I needed to _leave_ ," Rin says. She's surprised at how confident she sounds, almost taken aback by it. "So where else was there to go but to every place where you _weren't_?"

"You could have said goodbye, Rin," Len whispers.

"I could have," Rin agrees tepidly, "but I didn't."

Len laughs, this sound that clogs his throat and poisons the air in delirium. "No," he says, " _no_ , you didn't. Instead, you packed in the middle of the night on our seventeenth fucking birthday, Rin, and you _left_. I kept _waiting_ for you, that entire day, that entire. _Week_ , thinking if I waited long enough — thinking if I _cared_ enough — you'd come back. But you didn't." He is absolute fury when he glances at her, his teeth grit and his eyes glassy, pooling sorrow seeping from his every edge. "You didn't say goodbye, and you didn't come back."

(He doesn't say it as much as he radiates it. His words are an aura, a _feeling_ ; they crash over Rin and drag her into an ocean of guilt, the tides taking her under, under, _under_.)

"You didn't come back when I _graduated_ ," Len continues, his voice thick and laced heavy in malice. "You didn't come back when _Mom_ died. You didn't come back when I published my first _novel_ , you didn't come back when I got _engaged_ , you didn't. Come. _Back_."

Rin blinks. For a moment, it's all she can think to do. Then, "You got engaged?"

"Oh, of course that's the only thing you care about," Len scoffs. He isn't trying to be so subtle about his crying now; he's a dripping wet kind of angry, the sort that wrings tears out of him in nothing but spite. His entire face contorts to accommodate it.

(All kindness is forgotten. He is ice, like her. Cold because of what she has made of him.)

"It doesn't matter, anyway. She broke it off, and I bet that elates you, doesn't it?"

Rin opens her mouth, but the high-pitched screaming of the tea kettle interrupts her. She watches Len whip around, rubbing at his face with his sleeve before shutting the burner off and rummaging through several different cabinets to pull out teacups. He fills them both — poorly, spilling droplets of boiling water here and there — and dumps in tea bags and sugar, working with a dip in his furrowed brow, his jaw taut, veins pulsing.

He plops the two cups onto the countertop and shoves one at Rin.

She says, after a moment, "I knew about Mom."

"Yet you didn't come to the funeral."

Rin glances down at her tea and holds the cup painfully tight in her hands. "I wouldn't have made it home in time. I got the news late."

"From who?" Len asks.

She squirms in her seat, unseeing, unaware. The name scrapes itself out of her when she manages to get a hold of it, saying, "Gumi."

Cynicism drags wearily across Len's features; he sips his tea to keep it at bay. "So you kept in touch with her and not me?" he asks.

Shaking her head, Rin raises her teacup to her lips and says over the rim, "No. She — contacted me. I guess she dug up the address of the place I was staying at, God only knows how. She sent me a letter, but I was gone before she could try to track me again. It's been silent from her end since then."

"You're the worst kind of person," Len murmurs, the fight having left him. "The absolute worst."

Rin smiles weakly, the skin beneath her eyes creasing. "I know," she says.

(There's shame in telling him that she's only ever thought of him. Miles of distance between them has never blocked out the erratic ache of love that stings her when he graces her memories. No one can can fill the void he ripped out of her.

Maybe that's what makes her so awful.)

"I left because I thought it would be best for us," she adds under her breath when Len doesn't try to speak into the wall of reticence. "So we could figure things out. Or — or figure ourselves out."

"What was there to figure out?" Len asks. His lank gaze fixes upon her, an absent stare that spreads frost through her veins. "What could you have possibly spent ten years figuring out, and what could have possibly brought you back _now_ , of all times?"

Rin sips at her tea, relishing in the way it burns her tongue and thaws her frigid solemnity. She doesn't quite taste anything, but the warmth is what she appreciates.

"It takes a long time," she says slowly, letting her eyes rest on anything that isn't _him_ — portraits lining the kitchen's walls, bowls cluttering the sink, light fixtures that gleam brighter than the others, "to understand why you're in love with your brother. It takes a long time to try to fix that."

He flinches at 'love', as he did then, too. As she's starting to think he always will, because he can't take that from her. He can only take ammendment; _fixing_.

"Did you?" he asks, but Rin thinks he doesn't really want to know.

She shrugs, merciless, and says, "No. Never."

His breath stops just short of an exhale. She has never wanted more than she does now to slip her hands over his cheeks and hold them and watch the light cast fireflies into his eyes. But she restrains herself, her mouth dry and her head pounding.

"You shouldn't have come back if you didn't fix it," he croaks.

And she pulls the pin.

"I couldn't fix it because no matter who I am, Len, no matter what I _learn_ , I will always, _always_ love you. I will always—"

"No—"

"—think of you in the way that I _do_ , and I can't change that. Maybe I don't want to."

"Rin. Rin, _no_ —"

"I may not be the same person to you that I was ten years ago, but you're the same person to _me_ ; and I still love you. And that's why I came back." She swallows. "To tell you that I can't change, not even for you—"

"Rin, _enough_!" Len shrieks.

His fist collides roughly with the cabinet behind him, shattering glass that plunges deep into the pallid skin of his hand. A dismal streak of crimson spreads stark over him, unfitting in his visage. He's breathing in haggard rasps, chest heaving with the effort. Tears blend like the glass that litters the floor along the white of his cheeks.

Rin shrinks into her seat. Her ears ring with his yell, with the sound of crushing glass and splintering wood. Seeing him angry is inspiring. A momentous occasion that Rin would scrapbook if she could.

(Her mother had made a scrapbook of the she and Len when they were younger; Rin wonders now if Len has burned it, or thrown it to the wolves.)

"I don't—" Len retracts his hand, gripping his wrist loosely at his waist. He looks at Rin as if he's mourning her, watching her casket being lowered into the ground. "Your last confession hurt _enough_ , Rin, I don't — I don't need to hear it again. _I don't_ ," he says.

"My last confession…" Rin echoes as she swipes her thumb around the rim of her teacup, gathering smatterings of sugar and quaintly licking them off. She rises, suddenly, her mind not catching up to her body, and she moves toward him.

Len watches her, stumbles away. "You kissed me," he says, backing himself into the stove, fumbling to find purchase in his grip. His hand spills blood wherever he puts it. He turns his head away and closes his eyes. "At that party."

Rin sidles up to him, their proximity burning through her sweater, her tank top, her _flesh_ ; he doesn't really have to do much of anything to spark a supernova inside of her. She reaches for his hand, ignoring his hissing protest of, "Don't _touch_ me," to guide it to the sink. She runs the faucet lukewarm and presses his hand underneath the flow of water, watching it turn pink with all the blood it carries.

"I hated you," Len snarls, though it has no force to it, "when you left. You didn't even give me a chance to evaluate my fucking feelings, to wonder what it meant to me." He presses his free hand to his eyes, his teeth bared through the sob that racks him. "You didn't give me a chance. You were already _gone_."

Rin pulls his hand out of the water and wraps it with the nearest towel, but doesn't let go. She stares at him long after he stops staring back. "Have you?" she asks softly. "Evaluated your feelings, I mean."

"Sure," Len says wryly. "But what does it matter? You're too late." He yanks his hand away, whisking away the towel and wiping the cuts off on his jeans. "I'm done. I'm done with you, I'm done with waiting for you to make up your mind, because I've made up mine. I've moved on."

(He's tearing his hair apart again. His lips. His cuticles. He's tearing _himself_ apart. She falters for the first time, then; she isn't quite sure how to stop him, or how to save him, or what saving him even means.)

"I doubt that," Rin whispers. "You're the least decisive person I've met in my entire life."

"Yeah?" Len sneers, taking a daunting step closer to her. She can see that he's taller than her, finally, by nearly half a head. But he's infinitely smaller when he's crying and broken and unable to function without destroying something in the process.

It's a mistake, him attempting to make the gap between them smaller. Rin looks up, whatever he's saying flying way over her head, and despite everything — despite him claiming to have moved on — she wants to kiss him. She wants to kiss him and change his mind and make up lost time.

She's too impulsive for her own good. While he blows up on her again, she reaches up to cup his jaw, sharp and precise against her palms. He starts to trail off at her touch, losing himself, and in his moment of stagnant vulnerability, she touches her lips to his.

It's a chaste, pathetic kiss, but it blooms hope in Rin's frozen wasteland of a heart. Even with her eyes crushed shut, she can sense he's staring at her; she can read his eyes when she can't see them, and she can read, blatantly, that there is fear in them. Fear for what this entails, rather than for what it _is_ , which is perhaps exactly what Rin wants after all. Not hurt. _Fear_. His fear for the power she holds over him.

Then, he's shoving at her shoulders, resilient, and she stumbles away, away, _away_.

(She's always going somewhere.)

"What is _wrong_ with you?" Len cries, carding his hands wildly through his hair. "Are you stupid? Do you have any idea how to read between the goddamn _lines_?"

Rin pants out pleading breaths, bracing herself on the aisle counter. Her face is hot and red and she is _alive_ , here. With him.

"Loathe me all you want," she whispers, "but you said it yourself; I'm still your sister. You can't hate me forever."

" _Exactly_ ," Len snaps. He scrubs at his lips with the discarded towel, as if he can wipe the traces of her into abysmal nothingness. "You're my sister," he stresses, stepping away until the distance between them is laughable; there's no use in having a conversation when they're this far apart. "But apparently you've stopped seeing me as your brother decades ago."

(She isn't sure she's ever seen him as a brother at all. The press of his skin to hers has been mesmerizing since she was a child, and those brotherly and sisterly kisses and hand holdings that passed between them had _never_ been brotherly or sisterly to _her_. She'd said as a little girl that she would've given anything to marry him.

Her mother smiled and told her how silly that had been. That brothers and sisters didn't get married. They didn't fall in love. They _couldn't_.

How could she have been more wrong?)

"Mom raised us the same way," Rin says. "No space from each other, no time alone. You can't blame me for not seeing you like a brother." She hesitates. "And you can't tell me you didn't feel that too, at least once."

He bites his knuckle and cocks his head. "What do you want from me, Rin?" he asks. She expects more from him — screaming, throwing, shards of glass breaking in her hair — but he's oddly calm.

"I want for you to reevaluate." She tests her boundaries here, steps closer and tries to reach for him; the further she walks, the further he does in return, until he's against the wall and her hands are braced on his chest. "I want for you to just think of me as—"

"I said _no_ ," Len says. He starts pushing, forcing that distance, forcing those years.

Rin clings steadfast to him. If she lets go again, it's over. This hasn't been worth anything. She's come to see him, burned his image into her eyelids, but it doesn't make a difference at the end of the road.

Len whispers, "You need to go."

"I don't want to," Rin says, clawing at his collar for release. Her face is wet. It's her turn to be breaking, to spit her venom at him. "I can't leave, not again—"

"Then you shouldn't," Len breathes, "have left in the first place."

He's steering her for the door before she can formulate what she wants to say. There's so much to be _said_ , there's so much to tell him; but she's in the threshold, rivulets of rain glancing off her temple in the sheen of the storm brewing outside.

"We'll talk," Len says, his hands drifting from her shoulders to the doorknob. "But not — not tonight, _please_ , not tonight. I can't do this. _You_ can't do this."

Her attention flickers from him to pictures hooked to the walls that she didn't see upon walking in. In almost every single one of the pictures, she realizes, he's with another woman, ample busted and voluptuous, pink hair strewn from silk and eyes carved from the ice that breaks Rin's heart.

And she thinks melodramatically, _Oh. Oh, he moved on. That's what he meant. He moved on._

(Envy is a crippling sinew that slithers around her throat and squeezes. She's never cried this hard in her life. She never thought she could. His fury is her own. His anger is her misery, and his happiness is only valid if it's with her.)

"Len. Len, wait. _Wait_ —"

But the door is already closed, the rain is pouring around her, and she can't remember for the life of her why she thought it would be a good idea to come here in the first place.

Because it isn't her that's running away this time.

It's him.

(It's just — it's always been —)

 _Him_.

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 _fell asleep with stains, caked deep in the knees;  
what a pain.  
_ _now hang me up to dry  
_ _i'm pearly like the whites wh-whites of your eyes._

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 **[** a/n **]** — lyric/title cred goes to _hang me up to dry_ by cold war kids. their music is real good.

anyway. so this is a thing hnngnghgh I don't know how I feel about it? semi-content, but. I don't know. my writing style's been weeeeird and I can't get much into the gist of anything and this is the best I think I've done in a while aside from my prompt requests? thinking about deleting/restarting most stories on this account bc of how much my writing's been changing BUT AGAIN I'm just angsting, end me.

thanks for the read, by the way! I hope I didn't dissatisfy with that good LenRin Incest Angst vibe. ambiguous endings are cool. ambiguous _pasts_ are cool.

now excuse me while I fade back out of existence for a while _thanks_.


End file.
